In a 1964 interview with Farm Securities Administration photographer Arthur Rothstein, published in the
Archives of American Art Journal, he was asked: “What one factor about Americans could more or less sum up an American
quality?”

Rothstein replied: “I
found that a kind of individualism existed among the people, an inability to conform, a desire to be the master of their own
fate. Americans don't do what you expect them to do. Each man is an individual, and the one thing I found in traveling
through the United States was that every man and every woman was different. They all come from different backgrounds and different
nationalities. There was no homogeneous quality about Americans, and it was a fascinating experience to learn this.”

From
the Library of Congress website:

"Unique in their scope and richness, the Prints
& Photographs collections today number over 13.6 million images. These include photographs, fine and popular prints and
drawings, posters, and architectural and engineering drawings. While international in scope, the collections are particularly
rich in materials produced in, or documenting the history of, the United States and the lives, interests and achievements
of the American people."

Among the millions
of photos on the Library of Congress website are the Depression-era collection taken for the Farm Security Administration, the
Office of War Information collection taken during World War II, and the National Photo Company collection of Washington,
DC-area people and scenes. There was a political and social purpose to these pictures. But many years later, they have
become the best record we have of what people looked like, living their lives in the first half of the 20th
century, and what the American vernacular landscape looked like as well. In many cases, the people in these photos were not
identified by the photographers, leaving us with an enormous picture album of anonymous members of the American family, and
a treasure chest of unfinished stories.

And so, I am trying to identify some of the unnamed subjects and find out what happened to their
lives and the lives of their descendants in the second half of the 20th century. In some cases, I have researched
people who were identified, but about whom we know very little. In
addition, I am contributing an occasional article inspired by one of the photos. Like the photo of the lovely farm girl above,
I find these old pictures irresistible. Click the link
below to see a gallery of photos I am currently researching.

*Please note that my website has a glitch
at the moment that I am trying to correct. It is caused by updates to browsers, especially Firefox. When you click on a photo
to enlarge it, the link to return to the previous page doesn’t work sometimes. If that happens, click the “back
button” instead, and if that doesn’t work, click off the “Site Builder” tool at the top of the page.

All rights reserved. This website, and all of its contents, except where noted, is copyrighted by, and is
the sole property of Joe Manning (aka Joseph H. Manning), of Florence, Massachusetts. None of the contents of this website
may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including copying, recording, downloading,
or by any other information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Joe Manning, or his rightful heirs.